Tuesday, July 31, 2012

John Leonard, your unmeasured words have now inspired the Chinese to accuse Michael Phelps of doping!

Mr. Leonard, who gave you the authority to speak out loud about perceived doping issues for USA Swimming? You have embarrassed the staff at Colorado Springs and now in retaliation a Chinese doctor with unequally unmeasured words is accusing Michael Phelps of doping.

Do you realize that you have spoken for and in place of the USA Swimming executive director and you had no authority to do that? If I was a board member at USA Swimming you would be so fired!

From the Los Angeles Times:

"... LONDON -- First, there was this screaming headline in Britain's Daily Mail: "US Attacks China Over Drugs Row Supergirl Swimmer."

But the next move in the swim pool tat-for-tat war of words between the United States and China was truly bizarre and strangely out of focus, as a former Olympic doctor from China promptly decided to throw Michael Phelps and his 14 gold medals under the bus. ..." 
[Link]

Throwing around doping allegations without the "grow-ups" or professionals whose job it is to police this sport will kill the swimming category.

"Killing the category" is an adverting and marketing term which means you never hurl insults regarding the quality of your direct competitor's product or service. i.e. "Joe's Pizza" does not state that "Burger Baby" has "rat poop" in their food because the end user or customer will simply avoid ALL fast food once "Burger Baby" retaliates. 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The sky is falling!!! Because, you know, nobody has ever accused Michael Phelps of doping before...

The idea that this should not arouse suspicions is laughable. The history of swimming, especially women's swimming, and Chinese women's swimming in particular is littered with drug users. It is absolutely within reason to be skeptical.

Before the Chinese get angry at its accusers, perhaps it should realize that what is going on now is a direct result of their state-sanctioned doping program. All of its swimmers (and all of its athletes) will continue to compete under a cloud of suspicion for years to come.

“There's a history, and where there's a history, there's suspicion,” - Mark Schubert (as US Olympic Head Coach)

Tony Austin said...

America has a history too:

These two names come to mine in swimming: Jessica Foschi, Jessica Hardy

Anonymous said...

Yeah, and Angel Martino/Myers, Ous Melloui (US trained) and I'm sure others, which should just add to the skepticism and not detract.

That being said, the difference between the US and China is a history of bad actors versus state sponsorship.

Anonymous said...

Interesting thing about doping is that there have been a number of undetectable substances used by athletes for years that we'll never know about, but now athletes who are apparently clean just keep beating world records. It's pretty safe to say that if swimmers wanted to they could have been using undetectable performance enhancing drugs since people started modifying them to get around drug tests. Even now the tests really need to be looking for the drug you're on to catch it. Do we really believe that swimmers are now just that much better through training that they can keep beating records that were very possibly set by athletes who were doping just by better training techniques? Maybe.

But remember, THG was just one variant from a single facility that a specific test needed to be developed to detect after they already had a sample of it on hand and knew exactly what they were looking for. EPO was around for years unchecked, now variants of EPO. Yet times posted back when athletes were free to use them are getting crushed these days. If that's actually just from better training, that will come through more with Chinese athletes who are identified at a much younger age (from a larger pool of potential athletes) and put into pretty much full time training programs. I'm skeptical that's the case, but I also don't think it's likely clean athletes are now just that much better than athletes who could use performance enhancing drugs unchecked.